Devil's Fjord, page 24
‘I’m going—’
Before she could move he was on her, one swift blow and Alba Mikkelsen fell screaming to the sofa.
Flowers. Benji had them. Jónas needed them. The dead always went with flowers. It was like a rule. Maybe if they didn’t get them they couldn’t go to the next place at all. They just hung around like ghosts making the living miserable. That wasn’t right. Jónas would have loved it though.
And there were flowers there already. He could see that now from the place he’d sneaked to close to the graveyard, hiding behind a sheep pen in one of the fields near the priest’s house. Bouquets on a patch of brown earth. Not a soul around.
Days he’d been on his own now. Days when all he could do was run and hide and steal and watch. In the time since Jónas tumbled down the hillside, all the way to the rocks beneath the Lundi Cliffs, the boy had retreated inside himself. There’d been a reason to it, a kind of logic. If you kept away from all the bad stuff, the blame and the screaming and the beatings, you’d become invisible after a while. No one could ever hurt you, never again. You could live like Benji used to with Uncle Kaspar, fending for yourself, nicking when you needed it, a wild thing out on the fells.
But then the weather would change. Like today. You’d remember autumn was coming and bitter winter behind it. Hard enough living in the shed with Mam and Jónas then. Never enough money, never enough to eat. Out on Árnafjall, pinching eggs from the district sheriff’s coop, he’d never make it. If the mountain spirits, egged on by Jónas, didn’t steal his life away hunger and cold and loneliness would.
‘Mam,’ Benjamin Mikkelsen murmured as he tried to make himself small and invisible in the lee of the crooked wooden pen. ‘Ma …’
He’d seen her leave the graveyard, wander off, heard her calling his name. But fear kept him back. It always did.
It was time for a decision. He was hungry. He wanted clean clothes. More than anything he wanted his mother and she’d been calling for him. So whatever he’d imagined when he was out there on the fells there’d be a home somewhere.
The boy stumbled out of the shadows, walked over the firm damp grass of the sheep field, trying to avoid the droppings. Eyes on the graveyard, the patch of bare earth with its bouquets.
Ragwort and some blue blooms, small, insignificant, weeds really, that was all he had.
‘Jónas,’ he said, ‘you never gave me nothing. But I got flowers for you.’
Ryberg didn’t look sure about this. About anything. He seemed scared. Almost as trapped as her.
Alba crouched back on the sofa, rammed her legs tight together, wrapped her skinny hands around her knees. She felt small and cold in her skimpy, black cardigan and trousers, the best she could find for the funeral.
‘I buried my son today. And here you are—’
His fingers clawed their way around her neck, his face was in hers.
‘Shut up. Shut up woman …’
She did and now she could hear his breathing, smell it. A man in a hurry.
Alba closed her eyes and tried not to think.
Close to her, too close, Ryberg’s hard, flat voice forced its way into her ear.
‘God never said a thing about the sins of the mothers, did he? Why not, Alba Ganting? What do you think?’
‘My name’s Alba Mikkelsen,’ she murmured, keeping her eyes tight shut. ‘You should know. I got wed in your church.’
‘That was a child the fool before me married. A child no more. Silas abandoned you because of your base ways. All of Djevulsfjord knows that. Perhaps you have no name at all. Just … whore.’
No tears. She wouldn’t allow him that.
‘I never asked for any of this. I promise—’
‘What’s a promise worth?’ he yapped. ‘From a woman who’s fallen?’
A part of her still wanted to cry but she’d done enough of that for Jónas.
‘I am what this place made me. Just like you … ah … no!’
Hard wet teeth bit her earlobe. The flowery fragrance on him filled her head. Cheap aftershave barely covering up a stink that was old and fusty.
‘There is good and there is bad,’ the priest said. ‘Nothing in between. And when the black beast rears its head a man like me must listen.’
‘Please …’
He gripped her shoulders.
‘We listen and we let it loose. A devil can’t be cooped. We let it free to fly away not fester in our souls.’
‘For God’s sake …’
‘Upstairs. Look! Look, dammit.’ When she opened her eyes he was pointing to the landing. ‘You can walk or I can drag you.’
Close up his skin seemed dead, covered as it was with scratches and cuts from the razor, tufts of whiskers still left there from the beard.
He grabbed her arm, tugged her to her feet, kicked her once, dragged her all the way to the stairs.
Up the narrow wooden steps, into the room on the right, the one she’d cleaned from time to time and had to argue to get paid. There was a single bed pushed up against the end wall, sheets awry as if he’d never made it in days. A small crucifix stood above it, next to the sideboard where she put his freshly-washed and ironed shirts and underclothes. A bachelor’s room, lonely, sad and untidy.
‘I want to go home,’ she said, as calmly as she could manage. ‘My boy got buried today. My husband’s in hospital. My lad Benji—’
Ryberg started to undo his belt. There was the smell of smoke from the fire downstairs. Burnt paper seeping through the leaky chimney. Except this seemed fresh somehow.
‘I don’t want to!’
He sneered at that and tugged at her belt.
‘Take those clothes off. All of them. You answer death with life. With sweat and semen. With what I give you.’
‘No …’
She watched him remove his trousers then his long and ancient underpants. The man was ready.
‘Do as I say or by God, Alba Ganting, you’ll regret it.’
If she had the money to get out to Tórshavn, take the ferry or a plane from Sørvágur even she’d do it. Find another world. Anywhere but here. Except there was still Benji. That one door hadn’t been closed.
‘On the bed,’ the priest ordered.
‘I came expecting kindness …’
‘No. You came here for absolution and I’m the one who’ll deliver it. We all know you here, Alba. We understand what you are.’
Maybe she could try meek. The way she did when Silas turned on her.
‘I am begging …’
His hand came up. There was fury and a kind of madness in his grey eyes.
Give in.
That’s what always happened in the end.
She thought of how easy it would be to lie back on his worn sheets, stare at the white wood ceiling, freshly-painted like the windows outside. Think of nothing but Jónas and Benji and how she’d failed them. Offer up a pointless kind of answer to a debt that was not a debt but still, in the mind of this man, had to be paid. Probably wouldn’t take long and then it was done with. Until the next time.
‘Get on the bed. I want you bare,’ he growled. ‘Turn over, girl. This is not about your face.’
A wipe of her nose, eyes filling with tears, she was so close to obeying. Then she thought of Benji, somewhere out there on the fells of Árnafjall, of Jónas in his coffin. Of the way she’d weep over both of them forever.
She stretched up and looked out of the window, saw a figure in the graveyard, felt her heart leap with hope for the first time in days.
He was on her, pulling at her clothes.
‘I said—’
‘Fuck you, Lars Ryberg,’ she cried turning round and flailing with her fingers, her nails, her hard and bony elbows. ‘Fuck you.’
It was the first time she’d fought back. Perhaps that was why she won. It was so very unexpected. Kicking, biting, scratching, she pushed him away until Ryberg tripped over a pair of old slippers and fell hard to the bare wooden floor.
He lay there, struggling to get upright, more shocked than angry when she fetched him another boot with her right foot, then a knee to his face that left him grabbing at his bloody nose.
‘Who the hell do you think you are?’ Alba shrieked at him. ‘Who the hell … you’re supposed to be the priest. To look after us. Christ!’
She turned on her heels, stormed down the stairs, dashed out of the front door, stood on the steps, breathless, wondering at what she thought she’d seen. Was it real? Could it be?
Nothing moved upstairs though she thought she heard a sound nearby.
‘Benji,’ she cried. Then louder, ‘Benji!’
Arms out, the way a mother did for a lost child always, Alba Mikkelsen ran from Lars Ryberg and the priest’s house.
Something pricked her nose as she raced down the gravel path. Smoke, she thought again. Burning in the house behind.
Ryberg lay on the floor, curled in a foetal huddle, not knowing whether to laugh or cry. Then he glanced at his watch. Almost six. The flight left at eight. He had to drive to Sørvágur and be on it. Højgaard said so and he wasn’t a man to be ignored. Perhaps he’d delivered what the police superintendent had demanded. A reason the blame or some of it should come his way. In return the chance to jettison his present and his past and create a new identity halfway across the world.
Doing what, he couldn’t begin to guess.
Didn’t matter. Ryberg knew he was lucky to get out of Denmark unscathed after the girls in the congregation started talking. There could be no second chance. It was time to leave, to shed the priest’s black skin and find another.
Thieving, lying, conning the gullible. He’d be good at any of those. There were always opportunities.
All the same he regretted he hadn’t pushed it with Alba Mikkelsen. From what he’d heard he’d been owed that at least.
Ryberg got to his feet, found a hankie, dabbed at his face with it, wiped away the blood. Nothing broken. The caked stain around his nostrils soon vanished with a little water from the basin. When he stopped sniffing his own blood something else caught his attention.
Smoke. There’d been plenty the day before when he began burning all the papers and the pornography he thought might one day come to incriminate him. But not now …
He walked downstairs, still dabbing at his nose. The door was open. The suitcase stood outside on the step.
‘Idiot woman,’ he grumbled. ‘What the hell were you thinking, Alba?’
‘Not Alba,’ said a voice behind him.
Smoke. There was a fire nearby.
Lars Ryberg blinked, his mind in a whirl.
‘I was not expecting …’
Something coarse and heavy crushed the rest of the words, killed them dead as it wound a tightening grip around his throat.
Falling backwards, choking for breath, unable even to scream, Ryberg found himself glancing back at the room. The rope, the sisal rope, around the capstan seat …
Gone.
‘Smoke,’ Haraldsen said. ‘You smell that?’
They’d finished their supper and had been wondering whether to go back to the laptop and try to peer into more dark corners.
Elsebeth sniffed the air.
‘Yes. That is not a hearth fire, Tristan. Even if someone would light such a thing on a day like this. Why …?’
He was already at the door. Wooden houses, turf roofs, homes everywhere built like tinderboxes. The unexpected smell of smoke was never welcome.
Outside she joined him and the two of them scanned the low hill back to the village. A thin grey cloud hung over the sea by the Skerries but that could only be clearing mist. Nothing above the village. Nothing by the harbour.
‘Tristan.’ Elsebeth tugged on his arm. ‘The church. That’s the priest’s house, isn’t it?’
There was one old-fashioned fire engine in Tórshavn, manned by volunteers. Thirty minutes away at best.
‘Call for help,’ he said as he strode off, eyes on the rising plume twirling from Ryberg’s roof.
‘On the way I will,’ his wife answered, grabbing a bucket as she joined him.
Baldur Ganting arrived as they did. Then George Thomsen and some of the boat crews Haraldsen knew only by sight. Flames were licking over the front door of the timber home, wavering in the evening breeze, rising to the upper windows, red and yellow, spitting out dark smoke.
‘He cannot be in there,’ Ganting said, scratching his head. ‘The priest—’
‘Then where is he?’ Haraldsen demanded. ‘We must put the fire out, man.’
‘With what?’ George Thomsen asked. ‘There is no water here. Only what the priest can pull out of his well. And I do not see a sip from there doing much.’
They had to wait on the engine from Tórshavn, Ganting said very firmly and all those around agreed.
Haraldsen glanced at Elsebeth and knew she was thinking the same: would these men be so nonchalant if the building was one of their own? If the man who lived there a native of their hamlet by the sea?
‘Where is the priest?’ Elsebeth asked again. ‘Has anyone seen him?’
‘Perhaps,’ George Thomsen suggested, ‘he has gone for a walk?’
‘A walk?’ she cried. ‘When have you seen Lars Ryberg walk anywhere except to the shop and back? And the church?’
‘There was a funeral,’ he added, a little hurt. ‘A man like him might want to think a little after …’
Haraldsen rolled up his sleeves and said, ‘I will see.’
‘Tristan!’
‘I am the district sheriff, dear,’ he told her. ‘I have my duties.’
Then he marched off to the front door before she could say another word.
Close up he could feel the heat and the choking, noisome fumes of the flames went straight and acrid to his lungs. The fire had taken hold in what he assumed to be the living room. It had reached the upper storey and was now beginning to spark in the turf roof, sending flaming shards of burning grass high into the early-evening sky.
‘Ryberg!’ he cried. ‘Are you in there? Can you hear me?’
Someone behind him laughed and he didn’t want to know who.
‘Ryberg!’
‘Maybe he’s in the church!’ the joker at the back cried. ‘Not that you saw the miserable old bastard there much except Sundays.’
To hell with them all. He walked up to the door expecting Elsebeth to come screeching at him any moment. Against the cracking of the priest’s house timber, the sibilant hiss of fumes and flames, he thought he heard her voice somewhere and felt sure there would be a mention of the word ‘heart’.
He paused in front of the burning house then aimed one hard kick against the black-painted woodwork. The door gave backwards on its hinges so easily he found himself falling forward, stumbling straight through into the flames and smoke, the searing heat.
‘Benji.’
She wasn’t dreaming. There he was, sitting on the damp grass by his brother’s fresh grave, rearranging wild flowers among the bouquets. Eyes wide, tired, hurt, she thought. As scruffy as she’d ever seen him after all those nights on the hills and he reeked to high heaven when she hugged him, not that it stopped her. Alba squeezed her son tight to her chest, kissed his filthy forehead, wept and wept and didn’t think to speak, not for ages.
Something was happening back near Ryberg’s place. There was smoke. She could smell it in the churchyard. People gathering too.
Not that she cared.
Benji was back. Her Benji. Alive. Come to say goodbye to his brother.
‘My little lad,’ she whispered into his grubby ear.
He was never one for cuddles. Neither of them were.
Grinning, sobbing, holding his face in both her shaking hands, she nodded at him and didn’t say much more. There were so many questions.
Where’ve you been?
What happened?
Lots and lots of them but right then they didn’t seem to matter.
He was staring in the direction of Ryberg’s house. What happened there she’d pretty much forgotten now. The priest was a dirty old sod. Surly, unpopular, reclusive, not like the one they’d had before at all. No one liked him. No one talked to him much. He performed a function, Sunday after Sunday, birth after birth, death after death. Wedding after wedding, not that there were many of them of late.
‘I will look after you, Benji,’ she whispered, clinging on to him, trying to think this through. ‘Better than I ever did.’
That cold bastard Højgaard would be rushing back from Tórshavn as soon as he knew. Trying to take her boy away.
‘Won’t happen. Won’t let it.’
Still she tried to silence the nagging voice inside that kept laughing at her, telling her: Saying no was never your great talent, Alba Mikkelsen. First time ever you did was with Ryberg in his bedroom, and it was only the sight of Benji that prompted that.
‘I will not let it …’
Benji pulled himself away from her, picked up a few stalks of ragwort from the grave and placed them in her lap.
‘Did you see him, Mam?’ he asked and just the sound of his fragile little voice brought more tears.
Then he took a tightly-rolled wad out of his pocket, placed it in her hand. Two hundred krónur. The money from the table.
‘Wasn’t letting him have that. The thieving shit. Your money. Not his.’
‘See who?’
The boy just stared at her and she couldn’t work out what that look was in his eyes.
‘Who?’ Alba asked again though the question almost stuck in her throat.
No answer.
‘Benji. Talk to me. You’ve got to. I’m your mother. I’m … asking …’
All the questions flooded out then. Who and when and why and what. About Jónas and the Lundi Cliffs. And how he came to fall.
Her son just looked at her, mouth open, teeth in need of fixing more than ever. Silent. He didn’t say a word, just turned his head and shook it, quickly, awkwardly, lost.
Looking at him, head going side to side like that, lips moving, nothing coming out, a part of her began to wonder if he was the same boy at all.
‘Say something, Benji,’ she pleaded. ‘Just … talk, will you?’
